2009Q3 Reports: SIGBioMed

SIGBIOMED is ACL's special interest group for Biomedical Natural Language Processing.
Membership currently stands at 78, up from 39 initial members.

ORGANIZATION

The Chair and the Secretary will be elected in the fall of 2009.
In compliance with the BioNLP constitution, the first elected
Secretary will serve for 4 years.

WORKSHOP

BioNLP09, held in conjunction with NAACL09, was the first BioNLP workshop under
the auspices of the newly formed SIGBIOMED and the eighth BioNLP workshop held
in conjunction with ACL conferences. Twenty-nine papers were submitted in response
to the Call for Papers, and 12 were selected for presentation as talks and 13 as posters.
The two-day BioNLP09 workshop featured submitted papers and posters on the first day
and the results of the shared task on event extraction on the second day.
Twenty-four teams submitted their results for the shared task.
Twenty papers (6 long, 7 short and 7 posters) were presented on the second day of the workshop.
The two-volume proceedings of the workshop contain all the papers and posters from both days.
Most of the 75 people registered for the workshop attended both days.

We plan proposing BioNLP10 to be held in conjunction with ACL10.

FUNDS

In 2008, we received $1,500 from NaCTeM and $2,000 from CMC.
We spent $1040 on studentships and $ 214.20 for the website
In 2009 we've got $2,000 from CMC.
We are in the process of finding out the status of our shadow fund.

To encourage future donors and to report to our current donors,
we would like to propose that ACL provides quarterly reports
about BioNLP financial accounts to the BioNLP steering committee.

WEBSITE and MAILING LIST

We have a working web site that lists upcoming
events of interest to our members and links to BioNLP proceedings.
The website and the SIG mailing list will be used for holding elections in August – September 2009.
We use the BioNLP and AMIA nlp-sig mailing lists for announcements and discussions.